In these links you can find :

• In this page :
• Who is Hanif Kureishi ?.
• The biographer and the author.
• In my Site :
• Kureishi´s Links.
• Kureishi in 1000 words.
• Topics and quotes.
• Visual Books.
• Worlds, Cultures and Narrative in Motion.
• More hyphenated writers in UVPress :
• K. Ishiguro.
• S. Rushdie.
• in the World Wide Web :
• Kureishi´s Website in Geocities.

Who is  ?

Hanif Kureishi ( born in Bromley, Kent, on 5 December 1954 - )

Just like Rushdie, Ishiguro,Okri, or Mo, Hanif Kureishi is one of the most important portrayers of Britain´s multicultural society nowadays. This "Anglo-Pakistani" & "Londoner " read philosophy at King´s College, London, where he started to write plays. This allowed him to burst very precociously into the British Cultural Tradition because :

He won the George Devine Drama Award for his play Outskirts (1981); He was appointed Writer in Residence at the Royal Court Theatre(1982); His screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (1984)  received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. His second screenplay Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and his first feature as a film director in London kills me (1991)  were his following experiences ; He won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel with The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), but in 1993 the BBC spread his name all over the world when his novel was made into a four-part drama series. As you can see, a very versatil author as a playwright, screenwriter,filmmaker novelist,or even essayist.

His particular version of  Brecht´s Mother Courage was produced and performed by the Royal National Theatre and by The Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1995 appeared his second novel The Black Album (1995) and he edited his first non-fictional work with John Savage The Faber Book of Pop (1995).  His first collection of short stories is Love in a Blue Time (1997) and last year, in 1998,  he adapted one of those stories for film , My Son the Fanatic(1998), and he published his third novel Intimacy (1998).

To provide you a good description of  Hanif Kureishi´s narrative skills, I have summarized the first and the last chapter of the book written by Kenneth c. Kaleta in the below list. I think that with this classification, you will have an outline of Kureishi´s narrative peculiarities.

Kaleta has organized these peculiarities in another way on page 254 of his book but, in this case, I´ve organized them in relation to these topics: point of view, depicted worlds, themes,  narrative technique, elements of the prose.

• Kureishi has a particular point of view because he is an insider/outsider in Britain.

• His fiction is like a " liquid window " because it is based on conventions and on different topics of his current and dynamic urban society. This not only frame the scene viewed on in one side, but also it reflects the viewer.

His dynamic worlds include a lot of paradoxes in structure and in the point of view. References and allusions are expanded by juxtaposing comic events and serious ones.

• These worlds have a common microcosmos because he creates stories about a divided and overlapping London.
• His worlds are present in a very cinematically way.The flood of images, montages, close-ups, fades, and technicolor secuences results from the combination and experimentation in new genres to carry his themes.

• His main themes are disparity and diversity but he neither romanticizes nor propagandized present-day incongruities.

• He talks about those inmigrants that inhabit a dreamed-of,but imperative, environment.
• He uses cinematic expressions.
• Contradition is frecuent in his prose, because he considers that it is inevitable from every perspective.
• His prose has a contemporary literary rhytm which evokes the fast cross-editing of the movies and it is , in a way , much more visual than conceptual.
• Heightened dialogues are used to show how he use sound, sound effects, silence, and music in cinematic asthetic.

• His narrative technique deals with the division of each setting and each character ;
• Regarding to this division , he creates cast of characters instead of characters types.
• This style has evolved out of the tradition.

• Dressing, Movies, Musical trends, and Historical events are peculiar elements of his prose, and by using them he wants to make more personal the interpretation of his stories.
• He uses both classical arts and  modern arts, in particular pop culture, mainly from Britain and USA.
• This allows him to have a most accesible audience because it isn´t determined by country, culture,or philosophy, but by generation.

• Kaleta, K. Hanif Kureishi. Postcolonial storyteller. University of Texas Press : Austin, 1998.

Page maintained by : Jose Fco.Saiz Molina
Last Updated : 05/29/99